Can I do this 2 days in a row?

Justin Aion once told me that one of the ways he keeps his blogging going every day is to keep his post open all day long on his computer, writing when he has time. Let’s see if that will work for me for day 2 of this challenge, #MTBoS30.

It’s not even 8:00 and I’ve already taken 2 buses to get to work, warmed up the computer and SmartBoard (they are both a little cranky in the morning), made an answer key and put together my copies for the week. I’m hoping, rather fervently, that my Algebra 2 students will not look at the Law of Cosines as if it were an alien spaceship. But then again, a week is a very long time.

(This indicates the passage of time – my work day (teaching classes, anyway) is over.

Not my favorite day back, but not the worst either. I help my Geometry students to take a conceptual leap to surface area of composite 3-dimensional shapes, but it was a struggle in one class, and a disaster (which I abandoned) in another. I think having models would have been a great bonus, so I may try again tomorrow with a concrete figure. I tried to convince them that they were capable of figuring it out, but I read [some of] their distraction as giving up. Most of them like a good puzzle.

Prompt of the day: Write about a quote or verse that has inspired you.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared wish for may for once spring clear without my contriving.

Rainer Maria Rilke

“I believe in all that has never yet been spoken”Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to Godtranslated by Joana Mac

I came across the quote in the book Teaching with Fire, which was given to me by the first principal in whose school I worked. It’s not my usual kind of book – I don’t respond well to motivational reading/speaking – but I found the selections very comforting during those first few incredibly difficult years of my new career. And this quote embodies what I hoped (fantasized) for in my teaching. I still do.

I looked up the rest of the poem:If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,but this is what I need to say.May what I do flow from me like a river,no forcing and no holding back,the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,these deepening tides moving out, returning,I will sing you as no one ever has,